Like having coffee with your best friend, providing your friend is opinionated, passionate, and insane.

Menu

Quote

“Nobody allows their children to dance and to sing and to shout and to jump. For trivial reasons—perhaps something may get broken, perhaps they may get their clothes wet in the rain if they run out; for these small things—a great spiritual quality, playfulness, is completely destroyed.

If the child goes on growing with full freedom to be playful, he will turn out to be a rebel. He will not be easily enslaved; he will not be easily put into armies to destroy people or to be destroyed himself.

The rebellious child will turn out to be a rebellious youth. Then you cannot force marriage on him; then you cannot force him into a particular job; then the child cannot be forced to fulfill the unfulfilled desires and longings of the parents. The rebellious youth will go his own way.

For all these reasons playfulness is stifled, crushed from the very beginning. Your nature is never allowed to have its say. Slowly, slowly you start carrying a dead child within yourself. This dead child within you destroys your sense of humor: you cannot laugh with your total heart, you cannot play, you cannot enjoy the small things of life. You become so serious that your life, rather than expanding, starts shrinking.

Life should be, each moment, a precious creativity. What you create does not matter—it may be just sandcastles on the seashore, but whatever you do should come out of your playfulness and joy.” Osho